The stiffest test facing congressional GOP leaders is how to avoid another Obamacare-induced fiscal crisis, which top Republicans say would put their House majority in jeopardy and further deplete the party’s uphill chances of capturing control of the Senate.

Two different tactics are on display: In the House, the approach is to be meek; in the Senate, it’s to be muscular.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), whose grip on most Senate Republicans is strong, isn’t mincing words: He says the defund Obamacare movement that led to a government shutdown and near default on U.S. debt was a “tactical error” and “not a smart play.” The Senate Republican leader’s hard line leaves no doubt about his preference: Republicans should drop this fruitless fight and instead focus on keeping overall government spending levels low.

But McConnell’s bluster is tempered by House Speaker John Boehner. Given the unruly dozens in his House Republican Conference, Boehner has to let the specter of another shutdown and deficit crisis linger. But the Ohio Republican is beginning to shift his rhetorical focus toward oversight of the Obama administration. He privately hopes Obamacare begins to collapse under its own weight, and the majority of House Republicans organically come toward his view that a second fiscal crisis is fruitless, aides say.

Despite the seeming space, McConnell and Boehner share the same private outlook: Obamacare is a loser, but so are strategies to defund it with Democrats in control of the Senate and the White House.

McConnnell and Boehner are two very different men facing very different political circumstances, which helps explain their tactical differences. McConnell is up for reelection in 2014, a fight in which his Democratic opponent is shaping up as his principal political obstacle. Boehner must tack to the right, as he balances his responsibility to govern while trying to maintain his grip on the speakership. There are, perhaps, more than a dozen House Republicans who think the party reopened government and lifted the debt ceiling too early.

Government funding will expire on Jan. 15, and McConnell is beginning to define victory for Republicans as maintaining spending caps established in the 2011 Budget Control Act. That would leave 2014 government spending — except for entitlements — at $967 billion.

“To me, protecting current law when you only have a small foothold in the government, is the most honest way we’re probably going to be able to achieve” GOP goals, McConnell told POLITICO in an interview.

Asked whether he thinks Republicans should attach anti-Obamacare language to the next government funding bill, McConnell demurred.

“It’s going to take Democrats to do that,” McConnell said. “I think one thing people who were not persuaded [that the tactic failed] learned is that Democrats are pretty hard-over in support of Obamacare.”

Since the 16-day shutdown fight, Boehner is beginning to focus on oversight — using the tools afforded to the majority to expose what he considers the Obama administration’s missteps. On Wednesday, Boehner said “the biggest part of Congress’s job is to provide proper oversight of the executive branch of government.” If he dubbed that government’s principal responsibility a few weeks ago, it would’ve caused widespread outcry.

“We went through a very tough period,” Boehner said, when asked about McConnell’s comments. “As I told my colleagues the other day, we fought the fight, we didn’t win, we live to fight another day. The fact is, we’re going to have issues about funding the government come Jan. 15. We’re gonna have the debt ceiling we’re going to have to deal with again, the looming problems that are affecting our country are still there. We’re spending more than what we bring in to the tune of $700 billion this year alone, even though we have record income.”

The next test for Congress will be to see whether the two parties can reach a deal by mid-December on a large-scale budget agreement. The same issues that have divided the parties for years — taxes and entitlement cuts — make prospects for a compromise extraordinarily slim. Several elements could push Congress toward a deal — most notably, GOP hawks, who want to avoid steep cuts to defense spending in 2014. Failing to reach a mid-December deal would put the focus back on the Jan. 15 deadline to avoid a government shutdown.

Some Republicans say a unified focus on spending levels could prove to be the strongest ground on which to fight. Democrats loathe sequester-level spending — their 2014 budget totaled $1.058 trillion. If all Republicans demand a clean government funding bill at $967 billion — without health care add-ons — they could put President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in a tight spot: If they demand more spending, they will risk a shutdown.

“As far as what leadership does, I’ll let them decide,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said. “I think if we could put a vision out for what we’re trying to achieve — and it’s not the Obamacare thing, because this is getting bad press on its own right now — if it’s looking out and saying ‘Social Security is unsustainable, Medicare is unsustainable, how do we fix it for young people’ — we win on those issues. We win on debt and deficit. We don’t win on necessarily repeal of a law that’s been signed in and upheld by the Supreme Court.”

Even Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who has been defined by his staunch anti-Obamacare stance, acknowledges the dynamics have changed.

“Frankly speaking, the appetite for a rerun has diminished with the experience,” King said in an interview. “So what’s our leverage point? If it isn’t getting to the point where we had the partial shutdown, if it’s not a debt ceiling … what’s the leverage point? Public opinion is the only leverage we’ll have in January.”

This strategy is being helped by the poor performance of the HealthCare.gov website. Several Democrats — including Rep. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Sens. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Joe Manchin of West Virginia — have called for Obama to delay parts of the law because of the widespread inability for Americans to sign up.

But Republican leadership isn’t completely out of the woods.

In the Senate, McConnell will have to deal with the likes of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who has continued to lash fellow Senate Republicans for backing away from gutting Obamacare and supporting the deal to reopen the government and avoid default. Whether the right will follow Cruz’s lead again will be a big question over the next few months.

Many conservatives think that Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Cailf.) will be unable to avoid a fight over Obamacare as part of the new funding bill in the next few months.

And it’s not as though the entire issue is going away. Cantor, speaking during a closed party meeting Wednesday, mentioned Obamacare as one of the three topics the Republican Conference will be discussing in the next few months. The other two were reform of the nation’s housing finance program and the potential for a farm bill to emerge from discussions between the House and Senate.

“The American people are going to demand a fight in January,” Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) said. “Look, when this thing goes into full effect, some of those people will go, ‘Why didn’t y’all stand tighter? Why did y’all let this happen?’’’

That’s why top Republican leadership sources still expect they will have to expend a significant amount of political capital in the government funding fight in January. Despite the early shift, many lawmakers and aides in and around leadership expect the battle to be so bruising that they joke that Congress should call it quits until the 2014 election. Many top Republicans doubt there will even be a vote on immigration reform before the end of 2014.

And there’s the perennial question of whether the rank and file ever listens to Republican leadership.

“I used to say, ‘Oh, the tea party has hijacked the name Republican,’” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Wednesday. “No, they now dominate. It used to be the tail is wagging the dog. If that’s still the case, this dog’s got a mighty big tail.”

Asked whether the Budget Control Act’s $967 billion spending levels would be his red line in next continuing resolution fight, McConnell said: “I want to protect the BCA. My goal is to protect existing law, which is working — I believe virtually all, if not all, my members agree with that. I hope the House shares that view.”